No words will get to paper today, no thoughts about the organic branding that takes time, nor about the meeting place of a bar where a piece of praise was delivered for a bartender's lack of the pretenses kept up.

In my mind, definitely, I cannot picture him sitting.  I picture him standing.  Of course, there is the picture, and he looks fairly relaxed in it, of him sitting in his famous rocking chair, and in it, he looks literary, shrewd, and adversarial, and circumspect, and of course, Irish.  And by the way, if you're tired and in pain, and your back and your lower back hurts and your pelvis is tightening, all the muscles that wrap around your lower spine seizing up, from all the movements of life and interacting with people and turning this way and that, a rocking chair really is quite soothing;  it allows the muscles to massage themselves, that back and forth, and honestly it makes a difference, if you can get into one.  So it is, one of those poignant pictures, when his chair, still with the cushions, is upside down and on a mover's cart, being cleared out of his office.

But one can remember him, well, as he showed up, so young, so tall, so thin, boney, with that very straight back and that beautiful hair, his shoulder blades, back stiff, but his body eased with that magnificent smile, a kind of glow of attention and that real care, that real rapport with people, and a voice that somehow matched, very early on when he was running for congress in Watertown, or Somerville.  There's a famous reporter's line, maybe Mary McGrory, capturing the excitement of seeing this guy walk past, an excited man shouting out something like 'look at him!  he's a purebred,' or maybe 'a thoroughbred,' probably referring the magnificent Irishness, the cleanliness of the man.  And this was back when he was new at it, a relative amateur, but he was so good, this amateur, his amateur made no difference, he just had it.

And that, fortunately, or rightly, is the image we have of him, punching the cold air with his breath and his new ideas, ask not what your country can do for you.  He's standing in his press conferences, hand raised, smiling as he wraps up one thing and asks for the next question, pointing.  There are all the speeches, really, the 'we choose to go the moon in this decade and do the other things not because they are easy but because they are hard,' or, 'in the final analysis, we breath the same air… (I misquote),' or the 'Mr. Nixon and I are not… (rivers frozen in time)," etc.



Some of us aren't meant to sit down, the way our bodies were made.  We're made to stand up right.  And this, I suppose, if you let that kind of a stance unleash itself, it naturally turns you into a teacher, a pedagogue.  Think of great speeches.  They weren't made sitting down, except for maybe Roosevelt, because he had little choice, and even stood too, on his iron braces, supported by crutches and the like.  Lincoln was this awkward towering figure, but when you read him, or his speeches, you feel him standing.  And, like that urban myth, of secretaries with corresponding names, and the same number of letters in their assassin's names and other stuff like that, don't go to the theater, don't go to Dallas, there's this vulnerability that comes when sitting down, really an awful vulnerability come to think of it.  Picture them as bemused as they sit, or eating, or joking with a good friend, or speaking with their wives.

Of course, he was sitting, like the duck.  In that position, he could smile, brush his hair along the way it was parted, wave sort of stiffly, his neck bunched down.  He couldn't talk, couldn't quip or joke in a way anyone could hear, and come to think of it, as far as I know, the very last words he ever spoke, or might have spoken, more or less, even, are not recorded in such a way as to be left to history.

But the power they brought, as they brought it, they delivered it all standing up, tall, straight, unbowed, their voices rising over audiences and minds.

Maybe none of us are meant to sit too long in chairs, upright.  Lincoln reclined on a sofa reading the Book of Job.  Kennedy read in the bathtub, getting his books wet, but the hot water a necessity to keep him limber.

It's not so hard to gather the constant pain he was in, that difficulty of breath weighted down by a serious thing no one else can feel, as here in this picture with the good doctor Calvin Plimpton, President of Amherst College next to him, who was concerned and checked Kennedy's hands for a clue on the Addison's Disease.  Is the knuckle swollen some, indicating an arthritic condition, on top of what had been down with spine, putting plates in, taking them out.

I further ponder the matter of trying to fit the round human beast into the square slot of mass population society.  Commenting on a NY Times piece about a Hemingway, my comment was roundly shot down by the thought that this whole blood type and diet business is "wacky pseudoscience at its worst… Where's the proof," to which I can only respond, "Well, if you're an O, try it and see if it works for you, as I know, on an animal level, it works for me."  (Perhaps it's the great simplicity of it that irritates people.  Need an organ donated?  Don't get it from your sibling with B blood, get it from the African guy who's also O, and that way it won't get rejected.)

Today, I attempted, at least, to return to an old habit, that of getting up without immediately looking at a cell phone's email in box, the news headlines, the texts.  Today, I felt a need to get up, eat breakfast, have some wake up green tea, all the while really trying to avoid the modern genie, even though I was greatly tempted.  I needed to feel again what thoughts were there waiting me to attend them.  I had to listen, I had to let them come, I had to drift a bit, think one thought, then allow it to prompt another.  Why, as it sounds rather crazy?  Well, I felt the need, as it doesn't help to just let them fester, all those thoughts of what you've done with your life, paths not taken, money not invested, time wasted.  The only way to get on top of such thoughts, some of them a little bit dark, is to buy yourself some time to be in the presence, to be, as another  NY Times piece has just amusingly explored, in a state of "mindfulness."

It helped the day before walking through the woods without reaching for my iPhone.  Yes, there are messages I wanted to send, reply, make a call, but since my Sunday night at work had been a mess, and since Monday Jazz promised to be no better as far as the reservation book was showing already, I needed some deep mental chewing.  I needed trees and the light I could find in the woods and the colors and the textures near and far.  It wasn't earthshaking, it wasn't huge, but it was a step.

Though it's viewed as a haven for the less bright, I would argue restaurant work can be complex, rapid fire, perhaps like working a convention floor.  Quick, on your toes, responding, talking, listening, all the while concentrating on the delivery system.  Multi-tasking.  Conversations when you can, checking in with people.  The dance with coworkers, work politics.  Customer relations.  And all of it, yes, you need your time to process, to sweep it all up and put away in balanced cubbyholes.

To continue on with wacky pseudoscience at its worst, to project out of my thoughts, I wonder what relationship the news bears to my situation, my processing of the work I seem fairly adapted to, of how I need to deal with my thoughts, which then sets how I will deal with news national and international and all the accompanying blips and beeps and headlines and mouse holes to wander into.  How does my mind, set in my type O system, process, cope, make sense of?

Well, okay, JFK was O, and he seemed pretty able to get up in the morning and read the newspapers.  He seemed really quite capable, to say the least.  Voracious, he was on top of things, and could say to expert aids, 'hey, did you see that piece,' inferring good pedagogy, a lesson out of a story.  We see him on his toes, magnificently, but also honestly, in his press conferences.  The man could quip, and deliver one liners, quite meaningfully.

But remember, he was very well-read.  He had his books, read in the tub and elsewhere.  He had the long sense of history as a lens, as a way to digest the current blip.



The way we absorb news, are able to absorb news, of course, it comes down who are, the kind of being we are, the way we respond, the things we find important.  I'd gather that has something to do with our chemistry, the way our bodies operate, the way our minds tend to work.

Could one create a theory of how a blood type might take news in, absorb things?

"DC is bureaucratic," a wise man says, who grew up here in a prominent family of intelligent people.  Stifling, he means.  The road map, Ivy League, law school, law firm, etc., it's what's expected of you here.  Don't wander from the beaten path;  you'll disappear, become irrelevant.  " It's different out in Aspen.  You can be who you want to be."  There it's not weird, the being tired with whatever you're supposed to be doing.  Connections are made.  People can do more, be more, branch out, get some respect for what they do, get some help.

But DC?  Nope.  You're stuck in your pigeon hole.  And no one is going to help you gain recognition for doing anything beyond the bureaucratic.

I'm feeling bitter anyway, as I finally apprehend this great truth that I've somehow been overlooking these years here.  The waiter downstairs, who's life is easy, the kitchen right there, opens the door five minutes early for the flood of concert goers attending Dumbarton Oaks concert series.  The youthful guy who manages on Sunday is out of town.  My busboy tonight is known in circles as "Lento Gonzalez," as opposed to his brother "Speedy."  You'll be fine," French waiter tells me earlier, when I tell him it's the night of the concert and we need to be staffed for it.  It's in the waiter's interests that we run with as little staff as possible, not to dilute the tip pool, the amount of tips the staff gains for every shift, day and night, upstairs or down divided by the number of shifts you worked that week.  The Point, it's called, this measure of how well we did in a certain week.  Properly, it is rendered in French, so sounding like 'pwahhn,' with the n silent, sort of like the word for bridge, pont, but with a w sound.  ("C'est quoi, le point?" I mutter sometimes.)  So, I know full well, as soon as I get there, my Monday morning, the day the clock changes and casts us into darkness, I'm being thrown under the bus.  And before I know it, at 5:25, a regular couple, blithe with concert to attend, are sitting at the bar, and so it goes, and by 6:15 the bar is full, twenty dining.  And so it goes.  The beginning of a disorganized ride, a pile of unclosed checks sitting in the darkness by the computer register, glassware, dirty plates, each act not cooperating.


I have a restaurant dream.  I'm supposed to go and informally help out at French restaurant friendly to ours, as if the boss said, 'well, go down and check it out, help out one night, see how it goes.'  I slip in to this restaurant, my dream geography placing it down on M, and I wander in its labyrinths, unsure of where the hostess is, where an office might be to announce myself in, restrooms, dining rooms here and there, staff coming to and fro, talking, but not enough to engage, and so, just as I've slipped in, seeing what it's like, I make an exit, happily, my consciousness saying, 'no, you don't need ANY of that.'  Not that they aren't nice people, the chef there and his crew.  (And oddly, in a second part of the dream, a rat follows me out the door as I exit past a waitress through the outdoor seating, a rat I can't seem to get away from, which then, in perfect English, accuses me of being insensitive toward her...  But that's a whole 'nuther thing for Freud.)  It's enough to make me feel a Fellini moment, one I've never seen, one having to do with escape.

I guess I am hampered by seeing things in too much complexity.  Even if it weren't for instances coming out of past memories.  The many-sided quality to people and things that makes it hard not to be sympathetic to them, for one things.  But generally, something like Hamlet's issue of being, perhaps too intelligent, maybe that's it, or rather, seeing too much, sensing too much.  And after all these years, having gotten nowhere, yes, maybe it's time to see a shrink, to narrow down the complexities and see things simply and clearly, wouldn't that be nice.

I went to, and left, college under Reagan.  That's when the jobs started evaporating, bled away in trade agreements.  I went out into the world as the guts of American industry began its death spiral.  I watched as the cannibalism started.  Regular jobs left, replaced by those kowtowing to hi tech and the military industrial, software, telecom, biotech...   Bankers raided pensions, people's hopes for home ownership.  Our largest export now, I hear, weaponry.  Schools, the educational system retooled itself as a grim unimaginative factory to keep people up with those countries we'd cut trade agreements with, to eventually compete with the Chinese in their tech sweat shops.  Patriotism led merely to surveillance in a world perfectly suited for it.  My father, before he died, cried at the state of America.  G.I. Bill educated, a deep and firm believer in liberal arts, he understood just as anyone with sense might, details aside.

I guess at a certain point you get tired of apologizing for yourself.  (No one else does.)  I didn't get to go on in academia--perhaps the feeling was mutual--for reasons my father had long grounded me in, reasons alluded to, generally, in the Henry Giroux article below.  And quickly, yes, it is a slippery slope, when you leave that world.  Gone, the time and energy to really read as an intellectual should, for one thing.  Gone, the moral back-up and support of engaged colleagues, campus settings, college towns, along with the explicit sense of the importance of intellectual work.  Outside it, you're another widget maker.

I never made a lot of money, but I earned what I did make, and I put up with a lot, odd hours, waiting on the very low as well as the very high, a subsistence wage, a lack of retirement and a future and the security necessary to begin a family.  I still manage to sleep at night, but I'm in no more pretty a picture than a lot of people find themselves in now.  And before a certain time, or absorbing a certain general sense of things, I felt somehow it was all my fault.  I'd been handed the golden opportunities, and almost willingly tossed them away, almost with the zeal of a religious convert abandoning worldly goods to embrace the poor and low, albeit in a very undramatic fashion.

And over the years, I wrote a book, or at least something that looked like one, even as some took it to be plotless and pointless, no 'there' there.  I wrote a book largely about what it's like to find yourself out of the Garden of Eden--not that it is that--of a life in higher education.  I wrote a piece looking organically, at an experiential level, about the academy turning away, in its comfort, of its moral duties of pedagogy, an old guard preserving it, but amidst a general unstoppable erosion.  I wrote it with little encouragement, and it was a foolish thing to do, as we all know that time is money, and I spent years on it.

After it was done I looked around for some feedback.  A professor who'd been helpful, at least polite, bothering to read the few things I sent him and responding, seemed to lose interest, believing that memoirs should be kept private, not published.  The Kirkus Indie reviewing service I shelled out four hundred bucks for returned with a predictable corporate response as to what might sell, and gave away in its review its blatant bias about the purpose of education as the means for going out and getting a job in the more or less corporate world.  Why should I have expected anything other than that?

There was my father's praise before he passed away, which was all the confirmation over a decent attempt I needed.  Occasional readers would express approval and even sometimes praise.  But you write one book, put it out on Amazon...  Well, who wants to be famous anyway?  There is a narcissism in that anyway, the reckless inward look of the aggrandizing self-promoter.

Far from being welcomed back as something of a moral compass, no, it was obvious that in the eyes of the college I'd graduated from my book was out of the mainstream, therefore not a serious effort, maybe just because it hadn't been published in the mainstream way, the literary agent, the publishing house, etc.  Begrudgingly that I'd published something was acknowledged, as the book club proceeded to go through books feeding the general idea that their effort was mainly to serve the economy, shed light on how a law firm worked, or bow to the book industry itself with its thrillers and mysteries and crime novels.  Not much literary fiction.  And all of it related to the economic world and directly its entities.  My book?  No, too awkward, too weird, and maybe subliminally suggesting 'law suit.'


My reward, I suppose, for thinking outside the box, as a student, and later as a writer (self-taught), was poor grades, largely for thinking too much over things so that papers were late, the subtle insinuation that I was irresponsible, a stalker, a punk, a miscreant, a deviant.  No faculty dining club, a digestif after an impeccable meal with George Kateb (as Pritchard writes about in his memoir) for me, but rather a meal before a shift, reheating something late after a long night, a shift drink.

I did not set out by outlining a critique of modern academia and its corporate influences and the economic claims upon graduates.  I set out to tell a story, as I saw the story develop itself.  Later, if you want, you can take out recognitions of things.  You might see that college males are not the only ones who exhibit callous insensitivity in their behaviors.  You might see an assumption that white European ancestry straight males are suspect of something, blowhards, rants.  You might see the bias towards those who are going to intentionally go out and make a lot of money as being first class citizens, later invited, as lawyers and bankers, to be trustees, no matter the behavior of banks and law firms;  the bias toward a certain kind of intellectual, non threatening to the liberal post modern status quo, but far less adept at being what they are in the end supposed to be, teachers, not lecturers;  the seemingly ever shifting, yet ever static 'liberal' pieties that allow an academic community to ever justify their own place of privilege.

The artist's self-question needs to be disinterested, part of JFK's message at Amherst, if he's to serve society with his poetry, with his questioning of entrenched powers that be.  It was my thought to include Hunter S. Thompson along with Ernest Hemingway (both sensitive guys who can get dismissed as being drunks and louts, and not really the proper subject of academic study when compared to Dryden or Robert Lowell or Yeats or Joyce, even though they too are democrats and literary phenomena) and the treatment of modern reality, the prose pedagogically similar, in that they show the basic truth of life, like the need to preserve the nervous system and the benefit of a glass of wine when things get to be too much.

Among my influences, as it should be for many a writer, Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front.   With that book, of course, it's all caught on camera;  not just the societal assumption taught to good school boys, that it's sweet to die for one's country, the pieties of a teaching class fallen into selfish corruption, but a sustained trip to the hell that comes of it.  But there is that lasting element of being marched out, back and forth in formation, waiting for the real inhumanity to happen.  Here it's the blast furnace of war.  For us it will be trying to live off of Social Security, of jobs that just can't cover expenses, or dropping into artistic oblivion for not selling money-making art in a corporate friendly package.

No one can tell you, if you care about matters of education, that you are not an intellectual.  You will have to go and define it for yourself if you are going to be one, though, of course, it helps to read and be given an education in the first place.


Superfluous sketches:

I don't go out much.  I really can't afford it.  Chinese take out is a splurge, when I'm too tired at the end of the week to get to the grocery store.  I don't have a lot to write about, consequently, no Moveable Feast scene of meeting Pound out at a cafe.  I don't really know any Pounds anyway.  I'm too tired from my shifts anyway, and to go out to a real sit-down dinner is way beyond my weekly income.  Maybe not many epiphanies are had cooking bison burgers and smoking up the kitchen with PBS on in the background.

And then some days it occurs to you that the intellectual, public to the extent of belonging to the ideal of the learning institution and its disinterested truth, doesn't need to be successful as far as the conventions of distorted economy.  If the learning institution itself abandons its mission, adapting to a corporate money and influence, then there's not much point belonging to it.

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/19654-public-intellectuals-against-the-neoliberal-university

Henry A. Giroux | Public Intellectuals Against the Neoliberal University

Tuesday, 29 October 2013 09:16By Henry A Giroux, Truthout | Op-Ed